It perhaps requires no underlining but it remains sadly self-evident that human history and global technological civilisation (such as it is) maximally self-propagates as a function as much of its failures and dissonant misunderstandings as of its successes. The component microcosms of individuated selves that inhabit and interpret the shimmering whole in, through and as […]
Language is particularly useful and effective as a system of communication but it tends to generate ambiguity and confusion in equal measures to those of the invocation of clarity and understanding. It is not always or immediately apparent but the integrated systems of communication we inhabit are naturally and adaptively biased towards their own reproduction. […]
Imperialist wars such as this are the absurd brutalities upon which intergenerational trauma, reflexive fear and the inevitability of future conflicts are anchored. Putin will one day fade away from the world, leaving behind him only the bitter sorrow and haunting regrets of a broken people, on all sides of whichever borders prevail after this […]
Putin’s relationship with NATO possesses the essential characteristics of a pathological psychosis. He is so profoundly shaped by a narrative of fear and insecurity that he can not imagine (or influence) a world without it. He has in effect done everything in his power to ensure the continuity of the “threat” as reflexive self-validation for […]
I remember a phrase from Marcus Aurelius in which he asserted that the worst thing a person could do is to make themselves and their lives a kind of blemish upon the world. I have been thinking about this in terms of Vladimir Putin. He is certainly inflicting great savagery and brutal abhorrence upon the […]
Our fundamental theories of physics are only one experimentally validated “local minima” in a much vaster logical as mathematical and material cartography of possibility. If there is something fundamental that we are not understanding here, it represents a salient moment to ponder which of our axioms are incomplete, misinformed or obsolete. That is the point […]
Great graphic (from the people at Information is Beautiful) but it immediately raises a question of just how we measure severity, extent and consequence in this context. Is there an offset and identifiable boundary between naive analysis that concentrates on common as relatively unproblematic or pragmatic metrics and more detailed (yet broader spectrum) analysis that […]
Context: — Three ideas from linguistics that everyone in AI should know — I do wonder if we might fundamentally misrepresent our relationship to these systems of symbolic communication as something of an irreducible function of language itself. Noting here that the persistent problems of these LLMs with bias, truth values and drift into effectively […]
From within the linguistic frame of aspirationally certain definitions, can we lay claim to truths over what may be inaccessible as analogue, continuous and indeterminate if not otherwise and essentially mysterious or metaphysical assertions of knowing, understanding, possessing or proving sentience? Asking for a friend…
Context: — The Transcripts of an AI That a Google Engineer Claims Is Sentient Are Pretty Wild — A (prospectively Zen) Buddhist psychology in which the core of conscious experience is rendered as a discontinuously generative absence seems to be a much richer vein of sentience to mine than that of endlessly throwing larger and […]
Context: — Blockchain Guy Struggles to Explain a Single Practical Use for Web3 — Interesting, yet, in that this self-referentiality and non-existence are quite common across linguistic and symbolic or logical systems of reference when viewed from (i.e. inhabited as) gestalt bundles of artefacts, entities and systems such as those we reflexively posit our own […]
Context: — Can computers understand complex words and concepts? Yes, according to research — Is understanding a “simple” matter of inhabiting and adaptively observing or shuffling the relational properties of language? This raises questions of meaning as only being the suspended tension wire of inductive resonance across a logical frame of gestalt linguistic self-reference, without […]
Daedelus Kite 